Hezbollah’s decision to begin attacking Israel the day after the October 7 massacre has now led Lebanon into yet another major crisis.
Lebanon was already lurching from crisis to crisis before Hezbollah’s latest move provoked Israel into a larger war. The country was in financial distress in 2022, and it suffered the Beirut Port explosion in 2020.
It’s worth understanding how Hezbollah has brought Lebanon back to the brink. It’s also worth looking at this history to understand what went wrong.
It now looks like Hezbollah has brought upon Lebanon another war within 20 years. It last did this in 2006, when it attacked Israel and kidnapped the bodies of two soldiers. Hezbollah at the time was at a crossroads. It had forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. It then had five years of relative peace.
Hezbollah chose to murder former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, and this led to protests and the ejection of the Syrian army from Lebanon. Syria had occupied Lebanon since 1976, when it intervened in the Lebanese civil war.
Hezbollah found itself in a precarious situation in 2005-2006. There was rising frustration against it by Sunnis, Druze, and Christians. It forced Lebanon into war in 2006 via the attack on Israel so that it could burnish its credentials and harm the country.
Hezbollah exploits Lebanon’s turmoil
Why would Hezbollah want to harm Lebanon? Through destruction, it gains street credibility. It ruins areas and then helps with reconstruction, becoming both the arsonist and the fire department. This is a model for Iranian-backed proxies.
For instance, the Iranian-backed militias have helped bankrupt and ruin Iraq, and their behavior likely contributed to the rise of ISIS. They then helped defeat ISIS and “saved” Iraq. They are the arsonist and the fire department rolled into one.
The Houthis serve a similar function. Their decision to march on Aden in 2015 led to Saudi Arabia intervening in Yemen. The growing war led to much harm to civilians. The Houthis benefited from it, however, and they are now sowing crisis in the Red Sea.
Now, back to Hezbollah. Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s, and it benefited from the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah also benefited from Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israel invaded Lebanon to stop Palestinian terrorist groups from using southern Lebanon as a base to attack Israel.
This is oddly similar to what Hezbollah did. Whereas once the pro-Palestinian states in the region used Palestinians as a proxy to hollow out Lebanon and turn it into a front against Israel, Iran later did the same with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah grew out of the poverty-stricken and sidelined Shi’ite community in Lebanon. Lebanon was dominated by Christians up until the civil war in the 1970s. The civil war led to the Syrian occupation of part of Lebanon, and it led to the Israeli invasion in 1982. Chaos also eroded the Christians’ power in Lebanon, eventually leading to the Saudi-brokered deal to end the war in 1989.
But the war didn’t really end. Israel continued to control a part of southern Lebanon until 2000. Hezbollah benefited from Iranian support and the rise of pro-Iranian groups in the region, and it filled the vacuum left by Palestinian terrorist groups that were forced to leave by Israel’s invasion. As such, Hezbollah was the main beneficiary of the Israeli invasion, of the Palestinian failure in Lebanon, of the civil war, and also of the Syrian intervention and Iran’s Islamic revolution.
Multi-front threat with Iran
After 2000, Hezbollah emerged as the major non-state armed group in Lebanon. It used this to stockpile weapons and start the 2006 war. After the war with Israel, the UN was supposed to keep Hezbollah away from Israel’s border. Just as the UN did in Gaza after Hamas took over in 2007, however, the UN ended up emboldening Hezbollah. Hezbollah became exponentially stronger since 2007, just as Hamas did. These two groups then formed terrorist armies on Israel’s borders.
Israel did not recognize the emerging threat. Slowly, Iran built up these multiple fronts. While Israel was focused on the campaign between the wars in Syria during the Syrian civil war, and focused on the Iranian threat, Hezbollah and Hamas emerged much more powerful than before. Iran knitted them together into a multifront threat that emerged in the wake of the Syrian civil war.
In fact, Hezbollah was a major beneficiary of the Syrian civil war, which basically lasted from 2011-2018. As such, Hezbollah became even more powerful, reaching a new phase of its power after 2019. Israel, while focused on the Hezbollah threat, did not see the emerging multifront axis that Iran was constructing.
Israel also didn’t do enough to get the international community to focus on Hezbollah. As such, Hezbollah has now dragged Lebanon back into another war. Hezbollah has carried out 11 months of attacks on Israel, and the international community has refused to stop the attacks.
Now, Lebanon once again risks ruin, because it has allowed itself to be used as a frontline state against Israel, with proxy groups hollowing out Lebanon and using it as a base for attacks. One wonders if the international community will learn from this and try to end the Hezbollah phenomenon once and for all.